Holiday update

Well, I guess if I put off the run-down of my holiday any longer, I might as well not even write it. I'll just focus on the highlights.

First highlight: D1sneyl@nd! We had tons of fun, even in the rain. The return of Captain EO was a great surprise.

The highlight of my Christmas at home is usually Cookie Day. Some years I think this day is even more fun than Christmas itself. Ever since I can remember, my grandmother would take an entire day, a few days before Christmas Eve, to bake sugar cookies with her grandchildren. We would cut out the cookies and bake them in the morning, break for a pizza lunch, and then decorate them with frosting and sprinkles in the afternoon. And then we would pick out the cookies we wanted to take home and my grandma would give each of us our yearly ornament. It's a great tradition. And one where it seemed every part of the day this year was designed to upset me.

It started with my 23 year old cousin making us start at 7pm rather than 10am like we usually do because he couldn't get off work and insisted he be there for the entire process. My grandmother doesn't like disappointing anyone so we didn't start until after dinner. Then my cousin arrived, cut out about 3 cookies and got bored and moved on to something else. My other cousin took that day to announce she was working on Christmas Eve and so was not going to be at our family Christmas celebration. This cousin is still in high school working at a retail job, so it was a surprise that she couldn't come. As the grandchild most into baking and the oldest in attendance, it fell on me to help the little kids roll and cut out the cookies when everyone else lost interest. So there I was overseeing the cute little kids (my cousin's kids) and wondering if I would ever get to do this with my own kids. A short while later my uncle is giving my high school age cousin a hard time about getting old and what will happen in 30 years. I just start to see a long life with no kids flash before me and had to leave the room. To make it even worse, my family spent the next three days (including Christmas!) asking me why I was in a bad mood on cookie day.

Except for the questions, Christmas and Christmas Eve were pretty nice. Christmas day is actually pretty relaxing in our family as most of the celebration is on Christmas Eve. My main present was a pressure canner! Stay tuned for reading about my adventures in canning.

My mom also had a separate dinner party before Christmas with some of her friends. My mom is a lesbian so her friends are all same sex couples. Her friends were nice, but it was a little odd that my mom spent most of my visit home making sure we met up with her friends, rather than my friends. But even in a group of middle aged same sex couples, I can't escape discussions of family planning as one couple was slightly younger, recently had a commitment ceremony, and were planning on getting pregnant.

We returned home before New Year's and since my sister and her family did not come to CA for Christmas (and also my in-laws), we hosted them at our house for dinner on New Year's Day. We also had some good friends over and it was a very good dinner. One friend is starting a law practice and several of us were asking her about the difficulties of starting your own practice as a new lawyer. She mentioned some financial difficulties since she has to work for free sometimes while she builds her reputation and resume. Someone asked her what type of law she would focus on if money was not an issue. I'll give you one guess. Adoption law. I'm telling you, there is no escape! This did at least give us some laughs as hubby and I were talking afterward about whether we would want her as our adoption lawyer. Good to know her going rate is free right now. ;)

Holiday letter

I'm writing our annual holiday letter. As usual, I am including a bunch of pictures from the year. But I can't include pictures of what defines this year the most for us. I mean, I do have a couple of pictures of my meds and my Sock it To Me socks in stirrups. And I would especially love to send those to the people currently stuffing my mailbox with adorable, loving family/baby pictures. But something tells me it is just not appropriate. So I guess we'll be sticking with traditional vacation pictures this year.

Is it over yet?

I am not sure how I am going to make it through the holidays in one piece. It's only 2 days past Thanksgiving and I've already broken down in tears once. I moped around the house all day today. I am usually excited to go shopping and put up decorations, but now I am approaching it as a task to get done. Everything related to Christmas feels like a chore. We were at the mall and I found some nice men's sweaters and figured, "hey, let's buy one for each male on our list." I didn't care so much whether they would like them, but just to check off those names. I put up the outside lights today because the weather was nice and it had to get done. I don't even want to open the rest of the boxes with our inside decorations.

Remind me again how many days I have left until this can all be over?

Shopping

After re-reading my last post, I thought it was pretty ironic that rather than wake up at 4am to go shopping, the first thing I did this morning was get an ultrasound. It's like my own little early bird special. There are a couple of follies on the left side that are growing, and a few on the right that are not quite big enough to measure. So this is a bit different for me to have the left outperforming for the first time. I am sticking with my current dosage and going back on Monday morning.

The hubby and I did spend afternoon in the mall. We did get a lot of our shopping done, but are now really missing the outlet mall near us that closed due to the flood last spring. It's not looking like it will ever come back, and the mall we went to today just wasn't as nice.

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, the pies are made, the turkey is in the oven, and the parade is on TV. I am looking to having my family over later, but still when I think of what I am thankful for, I just think I am glad this year is over. Soon the meds and needles and uncomfortable appointments will be over. I'm not sure what will happen when they are over, but we will cross that bridge soon.

I know I do have many blessings. A great husband, a comfy house, financial security even with all the money being thrown at a pregnancy. But with all my family preparing for for B1ack Friday shopping, everyone is asking me what I want. I don't have any big gift I am hoping for this year. There is only thing I want, and money won't buy it.

Present dilemma

In the world of dilemmas, I feel mighty blessed that this problem is the biggest one I'm trying to solve right now. But still it is on my mind and I thought I might get some feedback.

It's about Christmas presents for my nieces and nephews and making sure we treat everyone equal (or at least that they feel they are treated equal). My youngest niece doesn't live in the area and is only 9 months, so I'm not really worried about her (but her present is going to be fantastic anyway). For my other 4, I'm worried that one niece will feel left out. She is getting a Hi.gh Sch.ool Musi.cal Wi.i game. She loves HSM and I'm sure will love this game. But her siblings are all getting physically very large items and so I'm worried that she will look at this puny little package and wonder what is up.

My oldest niece is getting one of those chairs you plug an ip.od into and listen to music and play video games. Normally this is relatively expensive, but we got a fantastic Bl,ack Fr.iday deal and so it cost what we planned to spend on each niece/nephew. The 2 and a 1/2 yo nephew is getting this thing he can ride on. My older nephew wants a ping pong table. I'm cutting a piece of wood to fit over their air hockey table and then giving him some paddles and a net to get a homemade ping pong table and still allow them to play air hockey. Again, not super expensive, but very large and will involve 3 packages to open.

To make it more complicated, we were offered 4 tickets to a professional football for our area team playing Christmas evening. The people who would most enjoy this are my BIL and older nephew, so we are going to take them. So my nephew is going to feel like he is making out like a bandit on Christmas.

One solution is to give some of the packages/tickets for my nephew as an early birthday present (his birthday is February). Another solution is to give my niece my old digital camera. She asked for one, although is a little too young for a digital camera, but since I'm getting a new one it wouldn't be a big deal to give her mine. But this would also just be an escalation of the present-giving and so is maybe not the best lesson to be teaching. A third solution is to give the ping pong paddles to my niece as a present. This would reinforce the message that they have to share and play together (although my sister and BIL are good at this already). A final solution is just to put everyone's name on everything, except for the tickets which only one of them can go to. Or maybe some combination of the above.

What do you think? Or am I over-thinking things?

On a more serious note, what my niece wants most for Christmas she is not going to get. She wants an American Girl doll that is made to look just like her. But apparently if you have black curly hair you are not really American and there is no option to get a doll that has hair like hers. There is actually only one option for any doll with black hair (which is basically their slave doll from the historical collection that is dressed in modern clothes). I find this horribly furthering the stereotype that all black people look the same.

Down

I've been down these past few days. First my friend Ella had her beautiful baby a few days ago. I am so jealous. Ella is great and I'm happy for her, but it just reminds me of how long we've been at this so far. See, Ella and I met on ivillage before we even started TTC. I connected with her b/c we are both in academia and were trying to work out when to start trying with the academic calendar. We had both planned to start in one month and then threw caution the wind on the same weekend a month early. But from there are stories diverged, although neither has been easy. One of the things that made my niece's birth hard was the knowledge that if we had been successful our first month, we could have had a baby at the same time. That was how long we've been trying. And now, here is someone who started TTC the same time we did, who even had difficulty on the journey to pregnancy, and now she has her cute little baby. I feel like I've been lapped again.

Also, as the Christmas season is getting closer and decorations are going up (not in our house as I believe in giving Thanksgiving its due, but you can't escape Christmas in stores), I remember how optimistic I was last Christmas. We trade off spending Christmas with each other's parents, so last year I knew we would be spending this year at home b/c his parents live nearby. This will be our first Christmas as adults where we wake up in our own bed. And I was so sure that it would be our first Christmas with a baby. I thought everything would be different this year.

Last night I went to my church's women's council meeting for the first time. I should have known to avoid it when I'm feeling down, but a friend has been encouraging me to go for a while. But as she was introducing me to people, the first question everyone asked was how many kids I had, or if my kids went to the parish school.

To be thankful

I feel like I've been math problems in my head all day. I keep going over and over what would happen if this cycle ended on day X and if I started clomid on day Y, would I be able to do the IUI in a few months? The problem is that Thanksgiving is putting a real crimp in my plans. I think that if AF comes on Saturday when I expect her, and I take clomid on days 3-7, then I would most likely ovulate smack dab in the middle of Thanksgiving weekend. When I will be in another state. But if AF can stay away for a another day or two and I take clomid on days 5-9 (my doc said either is fine, I should just calculate when would be best for me) then it might work out for us this month.

When I took clomid before on days 5-9, I ovulated between days 16-18. So that's what I'm trying to use to base my calculations. Our plan is to go for an ultrasound a few days before I'm expected to ovulate to see where the leading follicle is. If it's on the right, we will be set to go. If it's on the left, we have to decide if we still want to do the IUI. Since we are not quite sure if the left tube is blocked or not, we may decide to save money and just try on our own in that case.

MJ and Transit

We had a great time at the July 4th celebration yesterday. Because my last post was lamenting our city's inconvenient transit system, I have to share this follow-up story.

We ended up driving to the park where the concert and fireworks were. The main acts started at 6pm, but they had small local acts perform earlier in the day. The first band was called Transit and was composed of employees of the public transit system. First they did a decent rendition of "Respect."

But they are not only a cover band. Oh no. They also write their own songs. Including what will surely be a classic: "Take a ride on the MTA." And I have to mention "Afterparty," which is about using public transit to get home when you partied too much that night.

But the best part came when they returned to covers. The added a new singer for the next few songs and started a tribute to Michael Jackson. The new singer did a decent version of "Man in the Mirror." Then the band started playing "Wanna be starting something."

The singer urged the crowd to sing the words if they knew them. Apparently because, as it soon became clear, no one on the stage knew the words. So we had an instrumental version of that song. Followed by an instrumental version of "Rock with me." At least the first half of that song was instrumental. About halfway through that song, they realized "hey, the drummer knows the words!"

Except his mic was not on. Oh well, nice try.

They decided to try their luck at some Jackson 5. The first verse of "I want you back" was great. And the crowd was getting warmed up as it moved into the second verse. At which point the lead singer said to take it from the top. I guess they only knew the first verse?

Well, I hope they do better at driving the buses. Overall it was a fun day and a memorable attempt at a Michael Jackson tribute.

No transit

First I want to wish all the Americans a happy Independence Day! This is one of my favorite holidays b/c it forces us to remember our history and how lucky we are to live in this country.

This year hubby and I are going to watch our city's downtown concert and fireworks show. We've lived in this city for 2 years and last year went out of town for the 4th and so missed their celebration. But our city was rated recently as having one of the country's best fireworks displays, so I guess we better not miss it again.

But one thing this city does not have the best of is public transit. We are urban dwellers and love the city life and the ability to get around easily. Except this city makes it impossible to use public transit to get around and so anything not in walking distance requires a car. And we both hate to drive and hate to park.

The thing is, our bus system is designed as a bunch of spokes that go into and out of downtown. It seems like it would be convenient for those who work downtown and want to use the bus for commuting. But if you want to go anywhere other than downtown, the bus will do you no good. Unless you want to take the bus all the way downtown and transfer to another bus that goes out on another spoke. Not convenient at all. For example, I walk 20 minutes to to work everyday, but looked into how long it would take to use the bus on days when it rained. We live south of downtown, but almost due west of my job. It would take an hour and 40 minutes to get to work by bus. So I have to drive on rainy days.

But today we thought, "hey, the fireworks are downtown, let's take the bus." Parking would be crowded and expensive anyway. There is actually a bus stop right at our corner. So I looked up the schedule to see what time we should walk out to the corner.

The last bus leaves downtown at 7:15pm. Doh! I guess we will drive after all.